Call centers are used by many industries to provide information by voice communication to a large number of customers or other interested parties. Telemarketing companies, for example, use call centers to process both inbound and outbound calls, mostly concerning offers of goods and services, but also to provide other information for company clients. Banks and financial institutions also use call centers, as do manufacturing companies, travel companies (e.g., airlines, auto rental companies, etc.), and virtually any other business having the need to contact a large number of customers, or to provide a contact point for those customers.
Call centers provide an effective mechanism for remote commerce, that is commerce wherein the person making the sale or taking the sales data is not in the physical presence of the potential purchaser or customer. In general operation, a prospective purchaser typically calls a telephone number, such as an 800 number. The number dialed is determined by the carrier as being associated with the call center, and the call is delivered thereto. A typical call center will have a front end with one or more voice response units (VRUs), call switching equipment, an automatic call distributor (ACD), and several work stations having a telephone and computer terminal at which a live operator processes the call. The dialed number is typically taken automatically from the carrier (long distance) through use of the dialed number identification service (DNIS) and is utilized to effect a database access resulting in a “screen pop” of a script on the operator's computer terminal. In this way, when a prospective purchaser calls a given telephone number, a telemarketing operator may immediately respond with a script keyed to the goods or services offered. The response may be at various levels of specificity, ranging from a proffer of a single product, e.g., a particular audio recording, or may be for various categories of goods or services, e.g., where the dialed number is responded to on behalf of an entire supplier. In this manner, a call center may provide retail commerce on behalf of various merchants.
Most often, goods or services purchased through a call center are made via credit card transactions. Thus, a call center may have records of transactions associated with any number of merchants. As such, a call center record keeping service may be targeted for malicious access of financial information, such as credit card numbers. It is often desirable to maintain financial records associated with credit card transactions in either a fixed field or a delimiter separated value file. Because different merchants may require different information for effecting a transaction, records maintained by a call center may be of both fixed and variable length and may have different fields or data elements than other transaction records. Such heterogeneous records maintained in a common file or storage system may not present an effective mechanism for removing sensitive financial information, e.g., in the event that a particular field containing credit card numbers is not commonly shared by all financial transaction records.
Therefore, what is needed is a mechanism that overcomes the described problems and limitations.